A Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination

By Grover Jackson, Mary Fullard

A Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination is a literary work that is both autobiographical and biographical in nature and chronicles the lives of fourteen siblings raised in a two-parent household who stepped up to the plate to vividly reveal their early daily lives farming that never yielded any financial benefits. Revealed in each child’s account is their personal relationship with each other, their parents, and those family members who lived in proximity. Also there are stories of their reluctance to perform slave-type labor, disdain for their living conditions, dismay from the older siblings of having to raise the seemingly unending stream of newborns, the unrelenting weather conditions, and their father’s inability to manage the financial business of renting and sharecropping what little of it that he could control. In the middle of all the strife of living in the South, at this time, and dreaming huge dreams for herself and her family was a woman of great wisdom and acumen—the matriarch who saw fit to encourage her older children to move north and prepare a place for the rest who would come when it was fitting to do so.

The children never dwelled on the thought that they deserved better, just dreamed that they could do better. And better they did! They set out to find their places in the world by venturing into another surrounding. Their dream had a plan, and that plan was for one or two of the siblings to go North and be path blazers for the others to follow. The main idea was that their mother was on board with the hope of her children going North to find their places on the world’s stage. No sibling wanted to disappoint her. So the entire family made the migration North, leaving the former slave quarters behind. Each day, with the thought of Southern decay not far from their minds, each of the fourteen siblings became their own individual self with ten of them earning college degrees and five of them earning graduate degrees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645317234

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A Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination

Grover Jackson, Mary Fullard and E. Christine Jackson

Copyright © 2020 Grover Jackson, Mary Fullard and E. Christine Jackson

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-64531-722-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64801-575-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64531-723-4 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Journey Begins

The Journey Continues

Sibling 1: The Journey Extended

Sibling 2: Escape, Exploration, and Expedition

Sibling 6: Two-Parent Household Profile

Sibling 7: Geneva’s Memories

Unabridged Gap

Family, Foundation, Focus, and Future

Stepping Back—Planting Seeds that Moved Me Forward

Kenya’s Experiences

Day, Time, Place—All Remembered

The Decision

People Forks in the Road

The Funeral’s Visitor

Sibling 10: The Journey and Endeavors

Sibling 11: Unchartered Territory

Sibling 14: Chris’s Story

In Remembrance

The Siblings’ Legacies

To Gerod, my oldest son; Noah, my grandson; Sydney, my granddaughter; and the next generation and beyond. A special tribute to Gerod who will never understand our past, present, or future. Yet he is an integral part of this book, if not in words, in every thought. To Noah and Sydney who are too young to understand today, someday will influence and change their generation for the good of mankind.

Acknowledgments

To my friend Mattie, a college classmate, who encouraged me to complete this project and offered priceless suggestions, I am eternally grateful. To E. Chris Jackson, my youngest sibling, who thought my choice of some words and events portrayal were too descriptive and provocative so she neutralized many of them. Mary F. Fullard, sibling number 6, whose research started and generated my interest in our family’s ancestry. Finally, I extend my appreciation to Leola, my oldest sibling, who was strongly encouraged to participate in the writing of our history. Also, I’m very thankful to my sister Rosie, sibling number 2, who exercised love and a bit of reverse psychology in convincing Leola to participate in this project. To my other siblings, who, after much persuading, took the time to share their experiences and thoughts, and their life journey, I owe my all.

Introduction

This book is about a family that started with the creation of man. Then we drifted apart. Yet we traced our family of today back to 1827. Like most families, we were once one very close family, then people, place, time, and events changed and separated us. The idea for this book evolved over time. Friends and coworkers often said to me, You should write a book, after they heard stories about my background and family. The stories consisted of the twists and turns of our large family of fourteen siblings and our parents. Some of the stories were about twelve people living in a two-bedroom shack, where early education was undeniably separate and irrefutably unequal.

Still others shared the same family stories just as the gospel writers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; four different writers told the same biblical stories from their viewpoint. However, the stories told by my siblings and me will only be recorded in the Jackson’s epistle, this book entitled A Journey of Love, Faith, Strength and Determination. Our stories, like limbs on a tree, branch off in many directions: plowed other people’s land, went from sharecropping to Wall Street, joined the US Peace Corps and served in Kenya, taught in Iran, and so many more stories that told of desolation, despair, bleakness, anguish, adventure, pride, happiness, and so much more.

At no point early on did I take the idea of writing a book seriously, although I remembered many, many details about my life experiences. Years later, I revisited the concept and suggested to each of my siblings that we should journalize our experiences from childhood through adulthood. I pledged that I would organize the content into a finished manuscript that they would be proud to read as a novel, share with friends, or perhaps one day, watch on the big screen. It took some prodding, but eventually, they were sold on my idea. The collection of stories is not a rags-to-riches story nor is it a feel-sorry-for-me one. Instead the stories are about a family of fourteen sisters and brothers. They share their intimate thoughts about one another and their mom and dad. Their stories shine light on their mother who motivated and encouraged them to make a difference in the world. They speak about their father’s role in the family and how he impacted them. It was a real normal family. Well, perhaps not so normal, but it was certainly real.

During the period 1930–1958, our Jackson family experiences ranged from poverty, hopelessness, depression, oppression, suppression, optimism, and ecstasy. Some stories include raw emotions. Siblings share their personal experiences and feelings about each other and their family unit. Others chronicle the history of our extended family spanning nine generations to provide a background for our two-parent family. The fourteen Jackson children were born over a twenty-four year span of time. Our life’s journey was anchored in a strong faith in God. Although we may have travelled separate paths and landed on different church pews with varying religious faiths, God, family, and country directed our journey, and we were led by caring and loving parents.

The genesis for much of the background material shared in this book came from research started by my sister Mary F. (Mamie, sibling 6) Fullard and was continued by yours truly (sibling 8), Grover. At the Bryant family reunion on Dad’s side, held on July 14, 2007, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Mamie presented a thorough report of the Bryant family tree from 1827–1930. She titled her research A Journey of Love, Faith, and Strength. The title seemed very appropriate in describing our journey, but something was still missing. That missing piece of the puzzle turned out to be the glue that held the journey together. I surmised it was our determination, strength of character, strength of mind, strength of will, endurance, willpower, drive, and self-discipline. There was so much more under the umbrella of that one word that was missing. By adding that one word, it allowed us to focus on the big picture. She and I agreed to use her title and add—for emphasis—determination since it described our journey so appropriately. Her view of our ancestors was broad, but this book will focus specifically on the views of my siblings and our journeys. The time span will chronicle the fourteen siblings, who were born between February 1930 and February 1954, and our parents. Sadly, by the time we agreed to document our stories, six of our sisters and brothers had already passed. Their contributions to this effort will be posthumous. As I continue from where Mamie’s research ended and mine started, I incorporated more details about our parents and their lineages. Both Dad and Mom went home to be with the Lord more than thirty-five years ago. The life principles they taught us are etched into our DNA as we are confronted, from time to time, with the good, the bad, and the ugly. We practice the good, learn from the bad, and use the ugly as teachable moments.

As confirmed by my sister’s research, our earliest known ancestors, Bill Lewis Bryant Sr. and his wife, Phyllis (Thomas) Bryant; Dad’s great-grandparents and Austin Givens and his wife Josephine (Porter) Givens, Mom’s great-grandparents, were born into the system of slavery. Other relatives’ names discussed herein were retrieved from lists in the government’s archival historical records, known facts, and ancestry databases.

My parents spent years trying to make a living by farming. They tried both sharecropping and independent farming on rented land. They planted cotton, peanuts, and corn to generate cash. It was almost impossible to make a living farming, renting, and living on another person’s land. The acreage we cultivated and farmed was small compared to modern plantation standards of using automated (tractor) equipment versus our manual (mule and human) process. My siblings and I grew to detest the farm work of picking cotton, shaking peanuts, and pulling corn, although there was nothing we, as kids, could do to change our situation. I can only imagine how our ancestors felt and what they experienced as they raised families while laboring as slaves in the fields on plantations. It took great strength, courage, and undying faith in God to toil in fields day in and day out. It took their uncompromising faith in Jesus hearing their cries as they sang the African-American spiritual I Want Jesus to Walk with Me and other songs with similar themes. They likely prayed every minute to be freed from their oppression and misery. Fast-forward a hundred years and I know the line from Luther Barnes and the Red Budd Choir’s song Somehow Someway which says, We are going to make it to the other side, expressed my hopeful sentiments.

The foundation stories of my siblings contain bittersweet memories from their earliest experiences in Omaha (Stewart County), Georgia, a rural farming community. Omaha, Georgia, is on the state’s western boundary, close by the Chattahoochee River. The river separates Georgia from Alabama. According to the 2015 United States census per capita income data, Stewart County remains one of the poorest counties in Georgia. It is ranked 140th out of Georgia’s 159 counties. Data found in the same census report shows that there are nearly 1,900 households in the county. From an economic standpoint, not much has changed since slavery and our early years there.

As a family, we had food to eat most of the time, owned a few cows, chickens, pigs, and planted vegetables for our personal consumption. The family’s income depended on peanuts and cotton planted, harvested, and sold commercially. The family cultivated land, planted, and harvested crops on rented farmland. The result never yielded a positive financial outcome for our family. Instead the experiences came with many challenges and sacrifices and without words to adequately express the family’s plight.

Until the early 1960s, unless a family owned farmland, sharecropping was the primary source of employment with zero profit earned. Today farming in Stewart County, Georgia, is highly mechanized and much of the farmland has been converted into growing timber. My fourteen siblings, consisting of eight females and six males, were born in Stewart County, on land lived and worked by three generations of our extended family. Those generations’ entire existence was living and farming on another person’s land. With only a few exceptions, they never owned any land—not even a grain of soil—nor did they have any resources to acquire land of their own.

At the urging of Mom, Dad gave up farming and relocated to Camden, New Jersey. Before he made up his mind completely, five siblings—two brothers and three sisters—left Georgia, found jobs, and settled in various parts of New Jersey; some had even gotten married. In January 1958, my siblings who had already relocated to New Jersey purchased a one-way ticket from Omaha, Georgia, to Camden, New Jersey, for Dad to go seek work. With the financial help and sponsorship of my oldest siblings, we left Omaha, Georgia, on June 10, 1958—4 years, 110 days after the birth of the last sibling. We boarded and rode in the back of a Greyhound bus to Washington, DC. Beyond Washington; we sat on any available seat to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with Camden, New Jersey, as our destination. As the remaining nine youngest siblings, we traveled with Mom to our new home in Camden. Until then, none of the nine children, including me, had ever ventured more than fifty miles from our place of birth—Omaha, Georgia.

The family’s northern migration wasn’t the end to our economic and financial struggles. They both continued. The difference was that the family lived together or nearby as a family unit and worked together to solve the challenges thrown our way. Billy, sibling 3, our oldest brother who lived in Camden, made it possible for the family to secure housing. In 1959, he helped Mom and Dad purchase the home they owned and lived in until after Mom’s death in 1984.

The move exposed us to educational opportunities that didn’t exist for us in Stewart County. Through the years, ten of us attended and earned college degrees. Eight of the siblings earned degrees at New Jersey colleges and universities. Two sons earned their college degrees out of state at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). I was the first of ten siblings to earn a college degree and the first of five siblings to earn a graduate degree.

We were especially blessed and proud of our accomplishments, but no one was as proud as Mom. She never completed grammar school. While she may not have been educated in a formal classroom, she had knowledge and wisdom beyond textbooks and classrooms. She had practical knowledge and was well-versed on human behavior. She was the all-star coach behind the all-star team of our accomplishments. She was beyond her years in understanding and freely shared her insights with us. As was often the case, some of us, with years of education and degrees, were married and had families of our own before we realized the breadth and depth of Mom’s wisdom. Mom specifically taught us to do our best always, to be the best we can be, to be as strong as we can, to be supportive of each other spiritually, socially, and financially. She insisted, with faith, we could overcome any weak links in the chains of our lives that were meant to constrain us, whether imagined or real.

Mom’s formal classroom education ended in third grade, although her wisdom, experience, and common sense would match any graduate from an accredited college or university. She may not have been able to spell and articulate like a national spelling bee champion, but her perception was magical. Her grammar may not have earned a Nobel Prize for literature or a passing grade in today’s classrooms, but she would have been able to teach both the teachers and students a lot about life and how to make this world a better place for all to survive.

Mom supported, motivated, encouraged, and challenged each of us to work and become outstanding in all our undertakings. She insisted that we should never ever accept mediocrity. She cherished each of our accomplishments. She understood and believed that her children had bright futures if they focused on achieving their goals. She stressed that we must never accept the shortcuts or the easy routes and never accept handouts. She firmly believed in work, earn our keep, always help, support family members, and help others in need. Each of us accepted Mom’s challenge, overcame obstacles, made sacrifices, and kept our eyes on our long-term goals. Along the way, we all had setbacks and more than a few wake-up calls. We kept and honored her advice and legacy by assisting family members and others in need when spiritual, physical, and financial adversities presented themselves. In honor of Mom’s life, we established a scholarship through her church. The scholarship was awarded to worthy college-bound students.

Dad was always present in our lives. Mom was the real driving force behind all of us. She was a firm and committed believer in following God’s Word. Her fervent churchgoing ways, her persistent Bible readings, and her excellent demonstrations of doing were all characteristics extracted from God’s teachings. Mom had only a few life principles. She taught us, preached to us, and demonstrated them for us by her actions, deeds, and sacrifices. Her principles were: (1) Trust and obey God and step out by faith. (2) We will not be alone because no man is an island unto himself. (3) Our rewards will be beyond our imagination, if we treat others the way we want to be treated. (4) Each of our experiences in life must have a purpose that is built on faith, character, and strength. Because of our mom’s dedication, commitment, and personal sacrifices, our family thrived.

Our mom was a Proverbs-31 woman:

The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life. She opens her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue, is the law of kindness. She looks well to the ways of her household and eats not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her. (Proverbs 31:2–3, 26–28, ESV)

This was our mom!

Chapter 1

The Journey Begins

My Great-Great-Grandparents

We grew up in Stewart County (Omaha), Georgia. It was just another place in the Deep South. It bordered on the Chattahoochee River, across from Alabama on the southwestern side of Georgia. The area was home to the Creek Indians long before the settlers (Irish) arrived and claimed their land. We experienced and encountered all the negative actions and attitudes by whites toward blacks. The Ku Klux Klan’s (KKK) activities were quite prevalent. It was not uncommon to find dead black male bodies floating in creeks and ponds with both hands and feet bound. So to ignore the history of Omaha would be to omit and deny the existence of the people who once lived there; the Creek Indians, the former slave owners, settlers, my ancestors, and others.

Looking back, we lived in a place that was sheltered from the outside world and, in my mind, reality. It was also the place my great-great-grandparents were enslaved as validated by historical documents and oral history. Whether they were born there or brought on a slave ship, we don’t know and will never know. What we know, as recorded in the historical documents, are the slave names and estimated date of births that enabled us to figure out their ages. We know the names of the plantations and the slave owners who settled there with their slaves. If it were not for a raid by the Creek Indians on Shepherd’s Plantation, we would not have discovered historical documentation about the geographic area nor would we have records validating slaves’ names and birthdates.

We were able to trace my mom’s family back to (1827) and to Florence, an area less than five miles from my birthplace. They resided on property occupied by slave owners who, with the Georgia militia, had overtaken the Creek Native Americans’ ancestral land. The slave owners and Creeks once lived peacefully together, but after the US declared independence from Britain, conflicts generated between the settlers and the Creeks. The hostility occurred after Georgia was enacted as a state and operated under its own rules of law. One particularly offensive law stipulated that Indians could live on the land but they could not hold title of ownership to the land. Settlers and their elected officials used such laws to steal the land from the Creek Indians. Conflicts arose and skirmishes increased between the settlers and indigenous people.¹ General Daniel Stewart, President Theodore Roosevelt’s grandfather, served as an officer in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He fought and stabilized the territory for the white settlers. In 1830, as a tribute, Stewart County was named in his honor. My great-great grandfather, Austin Givens, was born three years before (in 1827) Stewart County was officially designated.²

The County’s History

The subsequent actions of the Creek Indians helped to bridge the information gap between my generation and our ancestors. The Creek Native American culture was highly developed and played a role unknowingly in identifying my great-great-grandparents while they were slaves.

The Creek, Cherokee, and other Native American tribes occupied much of the southeastern territory long before the area became the United States. The Spanish traders, the first Europeans, encountered the Creek Indians in the mid-1600. There is archaeological evidence in and around Stewart County of their sophisticated civilization. Like the whites who came after them, tribal members owned and traded slaves who were purchased from the Spanish slave traders. For many years, the whites and Creeks prospered from the land, hunted, fished, and traded with one another peaceably. Until the early 1800s, some of the Creek leaders were themselves a mixed breed of Europeans and Native Americans. Many took on the culture of the Europeans who had tried to stifle them. As noted earlier, The Creek Indians inhabited a large portion of Southwest Georgia and Eastern Alabama, including the area now known as Stewart County.

Increasingly tired of the white territorial infringements and land taken away, on June 9, 1836, the Creek Indians invaded the Shepherd’s Plantation in Florence (Stewart County, Georgia). Dr. Albert H. and his brother, Edward T. Shepherd, co-owned the Shepherd’s Plantation.³ To avoid the violence, Dr. Shepherd, his family, and slaves escaped and set up shelter in Lumpkin’s (Stewart County, Georgia) courthouse.⁴ James Fitzgerald rode to Fort McCreary with the grave news that the Shepherd’s Plantation and others were under attack.⁵ The whites lost twelve people in this engagement and seven people were wounded. The loss of the Indians was estimated at thirty killed and an unknown number of Indians wounded, but it was never fully verified.

Sources: National Register of Historic Places, Wikipedia, Georgia Plantations Works Project, Library of Congress. Data compiled by Janice Rice and Kim Torp

After several contrived treaties, some by their own interracial tribesmen and others by the whites, the US government forced the Creek Tribe to give up all rights to their ancestral land. Between 1836 and 1839, the Creeks and other Native Americans were forced to relocate to the Oklahoma territory by a treaty of law under Andrew Jackson’s presidency. This included Creeks from Georgia and Alabama, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole tribes from other surrounding states.

Flora Childs was the daughter of James Fitzgerald who owned the farmland where I was born.⁶ The Jacksons rented land from her, farmed and lived on her property for many years, until we relocated to New Jersey on June 10, 1958. All but three Jackson siblings were born in Flora Childs’ plantation quarters. Dr. Shepherd, owner of Shepherd’s Plantation, died in 1837 from exposure to the elements.

In December 1837, during the settlement of Dr. Shepherd’s estate, a list of his slaves and their values was revealed. Among his possessions was a young ten-year-old black slave named Austin Givens, valued at $450. This revelation gave us the name we had been searching for some time. It was the missing link needed to pin down my mother’s side of the family. We had been unable to locate her origins anywhere in various historical records. We had researched ancestral databases for years. Finally, we had data that could verify my mom’s ancestors and where in Georgia her family had originated.

The Family’s Genealogy

My sister Mary Fullard (Mamie) has always been curious about our family’s genealogy. As an adult, she drove our parents and others crazy with questions about our ancestors. Marie Woodward Flowers (Cousin Bae), the daughter of Lucy Bryant Woodward, my grandmother Hattie Worrell Jackson’s sister, was the first person to give her a comprehensive understanding of our family’s foundation. Cousin Bae did so in 1983 as they sat under an oak tree at a Bryant family reunion in Smith, Alabama. Cousin Bae stimulated Mamie’s appetite and created a hunger to learn more about the family. Mamie appreciated the information shared and pursued the family’s history more enthusiastically. She completed a thorough research of both Dad’s and Mom’s family trees. Later I supplemented her efforts by examining the historical records as reflected in ancestry websites.

The ancestry websites have handwritten copies of historical records containing names of people, places, and things. Her primary interest was to obtain our ancestors’ names, dates of birth, any unknown relatives (missing family links), and places they lived. Since we were born in Georgia, we knew our ancestors were former slaves and worked for former slave owners. We had no written records of the family history up to that time. The history had been passed on by word-of-mouth and was usually incomplete. This made researching ancestry beyond my great grandparents not much better than shots in the dark. As Mamie imagined, accessing historical records to match names passed on verbally was not an easy task and creating a lineage tree proved extremely difficult. Various research sites were the starting points for discovering ancestors before the Civil War and proved to be accurate and very informative.

In the 1830 Census, white slave owners submitted the census data for blacks via a list of slaves they owned. The slaves were simply part of their households’ items. Only the slave’s age, gender, and color were maintained on the slave registry. There were no names, dates-of-birth references, or any indication of their relatives. In 1850, blacks were included in the census data, along with names they were commonly called. The names were not birth names, instead they were informal names by which the person responded to when called. For example, William Lewis (Bill) Bryant Jr. was commonly called William Lewis; so he appeared in the 1850 Census as William Lewis, not as William Lewis Bryant Jr. It was not until 1870 that the actual birth name for blacks appeared in the federal census.

Based on Mamie’s research, from 1870 and beyond, the census form began to list the person’s name, date of birth, and death. However, in general, due to the lack of specific information kept on blacks, dates of birth were noted on official records as about time frames. This is usually written as Abt. Because of the data input and possibly storage limitations for Stewart County’s records, death certificate information was not available before 1918.

With the evolution of the Internet, Mamie searched sites such as Ancestry.Com and other genealogical websites. Her prayers were answered. She located the early genealogy trees of both the Bryant (Bill and Phyllis), my father’s family line, and Givens (Austin and Josephine), my mother’s family tree. The United States initial recorded census began in 1790. In that census, blacks were recognized only as a quantity, not by a name. The earliest official census data for blacks in the US was available only after the 1850 Census. Black families’ genealogical records before 1830 were passed down orally from individual family members. My family had no written records and those who may have had knowledge of earlier ancestors had passed away years earlier. Consequently, the earliest official census data about our family was not available until after the 1850 Census.

My Dad’s Mother’s Genealogy Tree

⁷

With the passage of time, my family’s oral ancestral history seemed all but lost. The individuals with any firsthand knowledge of the family’s past were either dead or too feeble and frail to recount anything factual, insightful, or intimate about the family history. The only remaining hope rested in locating some written records of my paternal grandmother’s family. We knew almost nothing about my paternal grandfather’s family. There was certainly not enough linkage to build a family tree.

It took a great deal of time and lots of stamina just to gather the fundamental ancestral information. Mamie had the drive, the interest, and the skill set to not only perform the research but to collate the data as well. We now have documentation up to the ninth generation of the Bryant-Jackson and Givens-Jackson family ancestral trees.

Bill Lewis Bryant Sr. and Phyllis Thomas Bryant were my great-great-grandparents on my father’s side. In my attempt to tell my own life story, I thought it would be meaningful to share some background information from whence I came. My siblings and I are the fifth generation since my forefathers and foremothers were born into slavery. For the most part, the stories told in this book are factual. However, with some of the details and experiences of my great-great-grandparents, I have taken the liberty to interject my educated opinions and imaginations.

My father’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother were born in 1835 and 1840 respectively on an unknown plantation in Coffee County, Georgia. They were born into slavery as Bill Lewis Bryant Sr. and Phyllis Bryant, nee Thomas.

President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery by the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that was issued on January 1, 1863. The Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. It passed in the United States Senate on April 8, 1864, and in the house of representatives on January 31, 1865. The amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, by three-fourths of the thirty-six states that made up the United States at that time.

Later Phyllis’s brother, Andrew Thomas, and other emancipated slaves, who were seeking self-sufficiency, trusted that God would provide for them and migrated to Mineral Springs, Omaha, Georgia. Mineral Springs was 145 miles from the Coffee County Plantation. Their journey of faith included young children looking for a better life than the one they left behind in Coffee County. It was a one-way trip on foot. The philosopher Lao Tzu is credited with saying that the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. As the Bryants continued their journey of faith and strength, destitute but free from slavery, I imagine that they thought and reflected on biblical stories that they had heard many, many times. God performed mighty miracles in times past. He separated the water in the Red Sea that allowed Moses and the Israelites to cross through on dry land as they were chased by their oppressors, the pharaoh and his Egyptian Army (Exodus 14:15–18). The Egyptian economy was built, maintained, and grew at the expense of Jewish slave labor just as black slave labor built the economy and maintained America’s southern states. As the families continued walking, I’m sure that they rejoiced and had faith that God was real. They rejoiced, laughed, walked, and gave praise to the Almighty God who delivered them from the bondage of their white owners. I can envision them walking, heading to a better place that the Lord had shown them, while praising Him as Lord, as Savior, and as Deliverer of their answered prayers.

I imagine that they fellowshipped and sang songs like the old hymn O they tell me of a home…far beyond the skies. They had no earthly home, only the promise of a home beyond the skies. I believe that they rejoiced and quoted Scripture that they had never read. Most slaves didn’t even know how to read, but God printed His Word on their hearts and in their minds.

There are so many biblical analogies to imagine as I think about the Bryant’s journey to the place where God would lead them, Omaha Mineral Springs, Georgia. The biblical story of Joseph most appropriately comes to my mind. Joseph’s brothers sold him to traveling traders who were on their way to Egypt. While in Egypt, Joseph was sold and imprisoned. But God raised him up and made him a mighty man. God allowed Joseph to forgive his brothers and save his family from famine. Joseph told his brothers, As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good (Genesis 50:20). Many years later, his ancestors became the great nation that God promised Abraham who was Joseph’s great-great-grandfather. I can envision my forefathers accepting and using Joseph’s words for their holy testimony as they talked about their former slave masters.

Bill and Phyllis and his family took up residence and settled in Omaha, Georgia, across the Chattahoochee River from Alabama. We do not know why they stopped in Omaha instead of crossing into Alabama. I am aware of no emergency. There was no need of a miracle to separate the waters over the Chattahoochee River as in the biblical story of Moses. Neither the pharaoh’s army nor former slave owners chased or followed my forefathers from Coffee County to Stewart County in Omaha. The answer may be simply that Bill, Phyllis, and their family were just tired of walking.

The Daughter, Laura

The children of Bill and Phyllis Bryant grew up, married, and raised families of their own. Their children’s names were: Bill Bryant Jr., George, Rene, Hector, Josie, Anna, Martha, Mary Lou, Lucy, and Laura.

My family line continued through Laura who married Frank Worrell, an emancipated slave who lived and farmed on the Fitzgerald’s Plantation. Frank Worrell and Laura birthed eleven children, and Hattie was one of their daughters. Frank L. Jackson Sr. and Hattie (Worrell) Jackson, after their marriage, had ten children. My father, Frank L. Jackson Jr., was one of the ten children. He and my mother, Rosie Jackson, got married and had fourteen children. I was the eighth child born to them.

Some eighty-plus years after slavery, my siblings and I were born on the very same plantation where three generations of our Jackson ancestors had worked—as slaves and free people. Some of us knew my father’s parents and spent quite a bit of time with them, but we know very little about my paternal grandfather’s family. The Jacksons just weren’t very chatty. My aunts would limit their conversations to subject matter that they wanted to talk about. If anyone deviated from their interests, they would shut down the communication. When they controlled the conversations, they would drill you with a series of questions until you were too exhausted to respond any longer or could not think of anything else to add. And under no circumstances were we as children allowed to question adults about anything. So, we did not even have word-of-mouth lessons about our relatives that the Jacksons did not freely share.

My father’s parents, Frank Sr. (Grandpa) and Hattie (Grandma), had ten children, but I only knew six of them, two uncles and four aunts.⁸ Grandpa and Grandma didn’t live together, and I never understood why. I was always curious. But I knew better than to ask. During that time, children never asked such questions even if they wanted to know badly. If I, or any other child, had asked, the typical answer would have been a reprimand of Boy! Hush your mouth! I am not sure at what age we earned the right to question any adults on my father’s side of the family. I can only say that by the time I started trying to uncover the family history at family gatherings, many of the adults who came, and their children, were ready to talk and share what they could recall or what they had heard.

Grandma Hattie lived with her youngest son’s family, but she did not eat with them. She cooked her meals separately, then she ate and locked any remaining food in a 3' high × 4' wide × 3' deep trunk where she also kept her clothes and other worldly belongings. When we visited, Hattie graciously offered us treats selected from her trunk. The food had been stored in containers, although over time, some of it had become stale and was unsuitable to eat. Of course, storing clothes and food together alone rendered the food as undesirable to us. Aside from the storage issue, the food, particularly her bread, was not at all appetizing. She had been way too heavy-handed with the baking soda additive and one could almost smell it. Her bread tasted as if the baking soda was the main ingredient.

As a child, we had to be polite to all adults. So if we accepted the food, we walked outside and happily fed it to the yard animals that were not so discriminating about what they consumed. Although we were poor farm kids, we never got hungry enough to eat food from Grandma Hattie’s trunk. There were other reasons beyond taste that made her food unappetizing. I was always very particular about both the food and the person who prepared it. I was poor, but I was discerning. My standards were high. Hattie dipped snuff, and I never ever knowingly ate food prepared by someone who dipped snuff. When I lowered that standard, the food had to have a skin or coating like baked sweet potatoes left in the skin or it had to be food prepared without a liquid. I avoided food prepared and touched by snuff dippers and others with unsanitary habits. Growing up, I was very, very picky about whose food I ate. I was not enticed to want to eat anything that Hattie offered. Two of my father’s sisters also dipped snuff, and I made sure never to knowingly eat anything they cooked either. It helped that Mom generally forbade us to ever eat at anyone else’s home, except our own. Most of the time, when we were offered food, we politely said, No thanks or We are not hungry.

My grandpa lived with his oldest daughter (Alsie Mae) who was not married at that time. However, Aunt Alsie Mae had been married at one time and her only child was a grown son named Roosevelt. He is my oldest living cousin. At the writing of this book he is still living in Miami with his family. Grandpa’s oldest son, my Uncle Grover, and my namesake, lived in Miami as well.

My great-uncle, Holt (Hope) Jackson, also lived on the Fitzgerald property less than one-half mile from us. He had mental and physical challenges, originating from birth. One challenge to him was a clubfoot. Some said his foot had been burned in a fire. Whether the condition was from a birth defect or from having been burned in a fire, it caused Uncle Holt to walk with a limp. As kids we had never known anyone else in our small community with such an ailment. This was long before we were taught to be empathetic and accepting of people with disabilities. He seldom ever visited our house during the years of my childhood. As a small child, we were afraid of him, if for no other reason than he was different. I remember that he lived alone. He did not mingle with the adults and never bothered with us kids. His strangeness in that way alone made him different. Our adult relatives called Uncle Holt crazy because of his anti-social behavior towards them. When we combined our imaginations, his clubfoot and limp with his lack of engagement with us kids, it was easy for us to accept that he must have been.

My father’s sister Annie was admitted to a mental institution when she was very young. She spent her entire adult life in the Georgia State Mental Institution in Middleville, Georgia. Consequently, I never met her. Just as with Uncle Holt, we were told that she was crazy; beyond that, no one took the time to explain why she was there.

The Jacksons and my Aunt Lute’s husband (Junior Hunter) were the only families who farmed and lived on the Fitzgerald’s Plantation during the ’40s and early ’50s. Two Jackson brothers, two sisters, their families, and my grandparents lived less than a quarter of a mile apart. The Jackson siblings and cousins who stayed there included my father, Uncle Holt, Aunt Alsie, Aunt Eula (Lute), her husband, and eight children, three boys and five girls.

Aunt Lute dipped snuff and was as mean as a spitting cobra snake. This is how I saw her through my young eyes. She was quiet but acted and looked mean. I had to pass her house when I went to the well to draw water and was hesitant and almost afraid to speak to her. Usually from early morning until evening, her sole activity was to sit on her porch and spit saliva from the snuff that always seemed to be in her bottom lip. My other aunts, unlike Aunt Lute, were quite sociable and often carried on conversations described as small talk. In those days, children rarely started a conversation with an adult. The adult would make a statement or ask a question and the child would respond. There was no continuous dialogue between an adult and a child. When addressed by an adult, the appropriate response was